His family and friends share his funeral wishes.
Four music links for today
LATimes: Sunset Strip Music Fest Photo Essay, Night One via tony pierce.
WNEW.com: Founding Father: Howlin’ Wolf
Mirror.co.uk: Interview: Iron Maiden: “That’s one of the reasons we’re now bigger than ever,” smiles Bruce, “whereas a lot of bands and people in general worry about what others think of them and change accordingly.” “We don’t because we’ve never really cared what others think. We always thought that if people don’t like it, that’s tough – we’ll just have to do it for a smaller audience. But the opposite has proved the case.”
Reuters.com: Q&A: Motley Crue still calling its own shots
Three Scalability related links for today
Dare Obasanjo: Dark Launches, Gradual Ramps and Isolation: Testing the Scalability of New Features on your Web Site
“Esoteric Curio”, the blog of Theo Schlossnagle, author of “Scalable Internet Architectures”.
b-list: Media and performance: There’s simply no way around this.
Cremation and Catholic Faith – Research
Ever have “that talk” with your family or loved ones? The one where you discuss how you want your funeral to be? Yeah, it’s a morbid topic to be sure, but following are some links I want to read when I get the chance:
American Catholic: Cremation: New Options for Catholics
American Catholic: Cremation and the Catholic Funeral
USAToday: Catholic parishes yield to cremation trend
Catholic Culture: Cremation Ashes to Ashes
Writing a simple proxy in Python: Some related links
Programming and Development links for today
PIBlog: Building a Python Web Application, Part 1
A Student’s Guide to Software Engineering Projects – Free eBook for Students
Raible Designs: Building high-content web applications (I wonder what we can share from work? I need to ask…)
Raible Designs: Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown at OSCON (likewise, I need to check what we can share from work).
IBM developerWorks: An introduction to Model Driven Architecture
The earth sings
Mark Morford, at SFGate, in April, wrote a lyrical, powerful piece about music the Earth itself is generating: “In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That’s because somewhere, somehow, deep in your very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source, to the Earth’s own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.”
As he mentions, scientists have been debating the source (or sources) of the ‘hum’ for a long time, a sampling:
Space.com (2000): Source of Earth’s Hum Revealed, Space Symphony Possible (Inaudible sound waves in the lower atmosphere that push and pull on the ground).
NPR: Detecting the Earth’s Hum for What It Is (it comes from the globe’s largest oceans during winter, apparently the result of powerful winter storms)
New Scientist (2007): Earth’s hum linked to coastal waves
LiveScience: Earth’s Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever (might be caused by forces shearing across the world’s surface, from the oceans, atmosphere or possibly even the sun)
Mark Morford says this is the kind of thing, in our day to day driven world, we don’t take a moment to stop and ponder: “This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.”
He’s right. My friends shake their heads at me sometimes and tease me for being a bit of a “hippie” for pondering this stuff. But it’s these kinds of mysteries that take my heart to flight, sing to me, and lighten my step as I think about the wonderful world we live in.
Mac Keyboard Shortcuts
Dan Rodney has a great list of OS-X shortcut keys, including the (to these Windows learned eyes) foreign menu symbols that can be so confusing at first glance: Mac Central.
George Carlin wouldn’t want the eulogies
But they will be unavoidable today. So all I will say is when I get home tonight from work, I’m going to have a good drink in his name.
You made us laugh. And think. At the same time.
We’ll miss you George.
Not all of us, but that is as it should be, how you preferred it, and that is why you left an impression on so many.
Metafilter: George Carlin Dead at 71
In my thoughts
Doc Searls has been blogging from the hospital these past few days and its been at times frightening and at times heartening to follow as each days up and downs are shared. Doctors have found three pancreatic cysts, but should be on his way home soon.